old superstitions,” so the Jesuits began focusing on the women. Together the Jesuits and young women made an Illinois Christianity based on a mutual understanding of each other’s values and needs.
Right from the start of the mission, Illinois women were among the most faithful attendees at church. As one Jesuit commented, “The women are … more disposed to accept the truths of the Gospel.”70 While men stayed home, the women and children went to mass regularly.71 Even among the Peoria, more resistant than other Illinois-speakers to Catholicism, many women and children went to mass.72 In Gravier’s words, “The young women here greatly contribute to bring prayer into favor, through the instructions and lectures that I hold for them.”73 In the first few years, the Illinois Jesuits thus experienced exceptional success in baptizing women: “The women and girls … are very well disposed to receive baptism; they are very constant and firm, when once they have received it; they are fervent in prayer, and ask only to be instructed; they frequently approach the sacraments; and, finally, are capable of the highest sanctity.”74
Gravier noted the remarkable ways in which the Illinois women approached the sacrament of confession. Importantly, this intimate, one-on-one interaction was only possible because the Jesuits had made tremendous strides in their linguistic skills. As Gravier wrote, “most of the older girls confess themselves very well, and some have made general confessions to me of their whole lives, with astonishing accuracy.”75 One girl, Gravier wrote, “has bared the depths of her soul to me, with much ingenuousness, I am convinced that she has a horror of everything that may be contrary to purity.”76 But she was not alone in making confession a popular sacrament in the Illinois church: “There are many who confess frequently and very well; and two young girls from 13 to 14 years of age began by making a general confession of their whole lives.”77 Confession was a site where Indian women and Jesuits established an intimate bond.
Illinois women were active agents in the creation of their version of the Christian faith. According to Gravier, they were especially skilled as translators, helping transform the Jesuits’ sometimes broken Illinois speech into more eloquent and rich language. To the Jesuits, this assistance in expressing Christian ideas “in their manner” was invaluable. On one occasion, for example, Gravier relied on a woman to help him explain the Old Testament to an assembled crowd. “She explains each [Bible story] singly,” he wrote, “without trouble and without confusion, as well as I could do—and even more intelligibly, in their manner.”78 When it came to the catechism, Gravier deferred to a young woman who showed a knack for creating effective translations. She “taught it as well as I … to the children.”79 In fact, Gravier admitted that because the women themselves were such good instructors, and held their own prayer meetings alongside those of the priests, the attendance at his own catechism lessons declined. This was no problem, Gravier wrote, since Illinois women were just as capable of giving Christian instructions as he was.80 In any event, Illinois women were key participants in the construction of Illinois Christianity.
As the Jesuits no doubt understood, Christianity gave young Illinois women a value system and authority by which to resist the oppression that many experienced from their male relatives. While Gravier and his partners were not feminists, they nevertheless realized that lessons about Christian marriage and female piety were particularly interesting to women who they thought could “profit from [our] teaching.”81 Clearly the most important themes of Illinois women’s Catholicism were chastity and piety. Gravier’s dictionary shows how he helped cultivate a spiritual language against the common Illinois marriage and sex practices. For example, he most likely glorified ideas of chastity, such as “ac8api8a avare: A girl who is difficult to have in marriage, or to corrupt [sexually].”82 He also probably emphasized monogamous values: “She prohibits her husband from going to a rival, a second wife.”83 Gravier almost certainly lamented the fate of prostitutes, as in “all the young boys abuse that prostitute.”84 He chastised practices that allowed for “debauched girls and daughters.” Through all of these, and many more terms, the Jesuits and Illinois women constructed a Christianity for resisting the Illinois gender order.
Jesuit accounts from the Illinois mission in this period are filled with anecdotes about how women used Christianity to resist arranged marriages and polygamy and to preserve autonomy and chastity. In one case, for example, an Illinois woman, skeptical about the man her brother had chosen for her to marry, announced her intention never to marry but to remain celibate. Her reasons were rooted in the authority and meanings of Christianity: “Despite the threats that her family gave her” and the “persecutions that they continually forced her to undergo in her family,” this woman insisted that no one would “change the resolution that [she had] made.” As she concluded: “No, my Father, I will never have any other spouse than Jesus Christ.”85
Other women used Christian-based arguments to resist polygamous marriages. One girl, for example, made her father promise never to marry her in a polygamous union. As she reasoned to him, “God forbids those who marry to espouse a man who already has a wife.”86 More dramatically, another girl first refused to consummate her marriage to the man her parents had chosen and then refused to marry that man’s brother when the first died. It was Christianity that provided her with reasons to reject the Illinois practice of marriage whole cloth. As she explained to a priest, “The resolution that she had taken to live always alone—that is, never to marry—was due to the aversion that she felt for all that she heard and saw done by the married people of her country.”87 Thus did Illinois women resist the slave-based polygamy that now dominated their culture.
And if women used Christianity to resist polygamy and unwanted marriages, they also adopted Christian models of femininity and Christian wifehood as templates for their lives. Gravier’s conversations with the Illinois women featured discussions about important female saints like St. Cunegonde, who reluctantly married St. Henry and then convinced him to take a vow of chastity. Gravier encouraged his neophyte women to model their marital behavior after Cunegonde and other “Christian Ladies who have sanctified themselves in the state of matrimony—namely, St. Paula, St. Frances, St. Margaret, St. Elizabeth, and St. Bridget.” In a culture like that at Kaskaskia—violent and frequently oppressive to women—the role models of these pious saints were a means for women to resist.88
Soon there was a whole female subculture in Illinois that was built around Christianity. As Gravier observed, “most of the older girls confess themselves very well.”89 Binneteau wrote that “the women and girls have strong inclinations to virtue.”90 Thanks to Christianity, “the number of nubile girls and of newly-married women who retain their innocence is much greater” than among other groups, according to Gravier.91 Soon the Jesuits could generalize that Christianity was a means for the Illinois women to resist the gender expectations of their own people: “There are some among them who constantly resist, and who prefer to expose themselves to ill treatment rather than do anything contrary to the precepts of Christianity regarding marriage.”92
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